Pattern Recognition #150 - Set Sizes

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

30 April 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

And so, with my grand and glorious number One-Five-Oh in terms of articles, I think it's time I looked at another subject that deals with large numbers and cards and numbers of cards and the sheer numbers involved can make the mind boggle!

Today, I want to talk about Set Sizes and Print Sheets.

Now this is purely behind the scenes stuff, there will be no actual cards talked about today, no mechanics listed, no crunch or fluff. Instead, I'm going to talk about the whys and hows of card numbers in sets and go back into figuring out the whys and the hows of these decisions.

At the core of this subject is a decision that was made before Wizards started making their game, something that covered before when I rallied against the existence of Mythic Rares as an extension of an older problem with Magic. So, to reiterate if you don't want to read an older article of mine, due to the fact that Wizards outsourced their printing of the game at the start, the printer they chose allowed them to print their cards on an 11x11 sheet, for 121 cards on each sheet of cardboard.

Or rather, that's what I thought, but it appears that some sets, like Mirage, used a 10x11 sheet for strange reasons that I can't fathom.

Thus, when Alpha was printed, the cards came on three sheets, one each for the Common, Uncommon and Rare rarities that went into the packs and boxes of cards. For this set, this initial print run, there were two versions of each of the five basic lands, 74 unique commons, 95 uncommons and 116 rares.

I'm pretty sure that most of you just mentally backstepped and double checked my numbers as that were correct, and they are. In contravention to modern card distribution, there are more Rares than there are Commons or Uncommons.

Of course, that is simply the way things were at the time. You see, there were more Rares because they were supposed to be rare. The idea of buying a whole box wasn't something that was considered. Rather, it was expected that the game would be a casual game, and that no one would go out of their way to collect cards.

Yeah... about that....

So commons were more common because they were more likely to be seen. And if I've confused you with my tenses, think of it like this. Commons already show up more so than any other rarity, and so my reducing the number of commons in a set, each individual common will show up more often. This allows for playsets of the cards the game was meant to be played around and with to be built quicker and with less investment. Rares were ... additions to the deck, not staples as they are now.

It was never part of the initial design of the game for cards like Tundra or Ancestral Recall to be more than a one-of in a deck, rarely seen. Cards like Craw Wurm were meant to see and be seen as they were common in a more metaphorical sense as well as via rarity.

Uncommons were just that. Uncommon. They would be seen in decks, but not as often as commons, but certainly more likely than Rares. You might even have duplicates to work with!

The next set kept up this theme, and I'm pretty sure that they were still trying to figure out how Rarity actually worked, as Arabian Nights as it had 26 Common and 52 Uncommon cards.

Yeah, I don't know either.

Revised Edition was the first set that used a whole sheet for cards of its rarity, where the Rare sheet used all 121 spaces for individual cards without duplication or padding by adding in lands or tokens. This was repeated in Legends.

The Dark printed all their cards on a single sheet, it was that small.

But it was Ice Age and Fourth Edition that went all out. Each of the three sheets were full of unique cards, with a fourth sheet dedicated to lands, making for a grand total of 383 cards! Or 378 for 4th Edition because they only had three distinct versions of each basic land, not four.

It was Alliances where the 110 card sheets I mentioned in passing further up came into being. This lasted all the way up until Guildpact, for a period of ten years before Dissention brought back the 121 card sheets, and that's where we've stayed since then.

During this time frame, around Visions, the distribution of rarities in the set started to become closer to what we expect today, with there being fewer Rares than Commons, though some sets, like Core Sets, maintained an equal distribution.

But then we come to Shards of Alara. This is the set that defined the start of the Large/Small dichotomy of sets, and it is no surprise that this is also the set that introduced Mythic Rares to the game.

For you see, by this time, Wizards had realized that consistent set sizes was a good thing to have. This helped player confidence that there were no odd numbers of cards in the set (not Odd as in something that gets around Void Winnower, but Odd in that there was little consistency between sets). And perhaps more importantly, it also helped in the development of sets by knowing how many card slots they had to fill in as a number that had already been defined.

As a guy who likes plans and reliable information, I can attest to the fact that this sort of thing makes things easier and more productive, that you have one less variable to worry about which means you can focus that sliver of more time on what actually matters.

Now, Wizards decided that over the course of a year, there would be 2 Large Sets, and two Small sets. The large ones would be a Core Set, and the headlining set for that year's expansion block, with the two smaller sets being the other two sets in the block. Supplementary sets would tend to use Small set enumeration for ease of development.

Large Sets consisted of five print sheets, one for basic lands, one for the 15 Mythic Rares, and two printings of each of the 53 Rares, the third for the 60 Uncommons, printed twice, then two sheets for the commons. One of 60 printed twice, and one of 40 printed three times. But the former was printed out three times to the latter's twice in order to keep the actual totals the same for each common.

Small sets were printed on four sheets, with the basic lands simply being overrun from the associated large set. The first sheet consisted of the 10 Mythic rares, printed 3 times each, 15 Rares joined it, printed 6 times each. The second sheet had the other 20 rares, printed six times each - this made the ratio of Mythics and Rares the same across small and large sets. Then the uncommon sheet had each of the 40 uncommons printed thrice while there were 60 commons printed twice each on a sheet.

In all cases, there is a 'filler' card on each relevant sheet. A token or informational card. Nothing actually in the game, but an extra.

And this is what Wizards has worked with to the modern day with a couple of exceptions. Innistrad had a special sheet for the double-faced cards because they didn't have a card back and all had to be on the same sheet. Dark Ascension had two such sheets.

Of course, there were other exceptions. Oath of the Gatewatch had a 12-42-60-68 distribution to help support the Eldrazi in it. Shadows over Innistrad was 18-59-100-105 for some reason that I can't figure out. Eldritch Moon was 14-47-70-74 for equally odd reasons.

And that's where we stand today. Sure, we've moved into all Large sets with more reprints to help fill out the set, but the basic set sizing has stayed the same for over a decade now. It's a tried and proven position that I can't really find fault with. Well, except for the Mythic Rares, but that's a subject I've already covered.

So, what's the point behind all this? Why am I just reciting mostly dry facts that have probably caused your eyes to glaze over like they did while I was writing this whole thing?

Well, the first thing I wanted to point out was how the game moved from being Rare Heavy to Common Heavy. When I first pointed this out, I said that this was partly based around the assumption that people wouldn't be buying more than a handful of packs with which to make their decks. A statement quickly proven wrong as evidenced by the existence of the Beta printing and then the Unlimited printing.

But then I wanted to talk about what this meant for the game itself. In the end, this decision was based around money. It's quite understandable, really.

A set with more rares drives sales as people open packs to get at the chase cards in the set. When I worked for my [s]F[/s]LGS, we would open a couple of cases and set the Rares aside specially because they would be the ones that people would most want. These sales gets back to Wizards until the secondary market catches up and then people stop opening packs. This tends to happen after about three months, give or take. Now while sets will keep selling even after that time, the majority of the sales come before the release of the next set. And sales after said release drop off quite drastically.

Heck, I've bought packs for sets a year old or more. And I've sold Return to Ravnica block packs to people long after that set was done and gone with simply because of the Shock Lands in them and the chance to pull one.

But what really drives sales is why there are more different commons. You see, Wizards knows now that what really drives sales aren't chase rares. They're the icing on the cake that they want to eat.

It's the Limited formats. Sealed and Draft are the bread of Magic, the formats that directly sell packs every time an event fires. 8 people tournament? That's 2/3 of a box right there. And so the plethora of commons and uncommons are there to make the limited formats more enticing and better played. The rares are just that. Actually Rare, which means that it would be a metaphorical return to the way the game was originally intended to be played. At the common and uncommon level.

In addition, there is one last aspect of the way card enumeration has evolved over time that I cannot help but notice, if only because I'm a true Old Fogey. You see, to me, the average size of a set has gone down. Even with the move to Large Sets all the time, it just means more reprints rather than more cards. I recall the highlights of Ice Age and for a while after, where there were over 300 cards in a set. Packs were varied and interesting! I could open half a dozen packs and get no duplicates!

Of course, what I like and Wizards has experimented with for twenty five years doesn't always match up. They've made their decisions regarding the technology and time they have to work with, and that has meant that they have worked very hard to optimize set sizes to balance out the needs of the various formats as well their own bottom line. And for the most part, I think they have reached a good balance point, though I may disagree with the specifics.

And you know what I find really fun?

Wizards made 121 card sheets the industry standard. How's that for long term effects?

Join me next week when I talk about something else! What it is, I don't know yet.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!